The Uses of Balkanism: Representation and Power in British Travel Writing, 1850-1914

Abstract

THE SLAVONIC AND EAST EUROPEAN REVIEW Volume82, Number3 July 2004 The Uses of Balkanism: Representation and Power in British Travel Writing, I 850- 9 I4 ANDREW HAMMOND IN the scholarship on balkanism that has emerged over the last ten yearsthereisinsufficientanalysisof the relationbetween representation andpower. On theactualformthatbalkanismhastakenthescholarship is detailedand largelyunanimous,with MariaTodorova,Milica BakicHayden , Vesna Goldsworthyand otherslocating a conceptual framework composed of violence, discordand backwardnesswhich delimits the antitype of the enlightened West. Yet the functions and material effectsof balkanistrepresentationare rarelyanalysedin depth, and are at times omitted altogether.' The oddity of the omission is clear when one recalls that the roots of this branch of critical inquiry lie in the poststructuralistfield of colonial discourseanalysisinspiredby Edward Said's Orientalism (I979). As Said'sworkexemplified,herewas a critical school dedicated to exposing the ways in which the West'sunderstanding of other cultures vindicates and advances forms of power, particularlycolonialism.2For balkanism, it is as if the general lack of directWesterncolonization of the region has crippleddiscussionof the power relationsunderlyingrepresentation.This is illustratedby K. E. Fleming's 'Orientalism, the Balkans, and Balkan Historiography', in which the commonalities and contrasts between orientalism and Andrew Hammond is a Lecturer in Twentieth-Century Literature at the Swansea Institute, University of Wales. ' See Goldsworthy's thesis in her Inventing Ruritania:7he Imperialism oftheImagination, New Haven, CT and London, I998. 2 Said defined orientalism, for example, as the 'Western style for dominating, restructuring , and having authority over the Orient': Said, Orientalism, new edn, London, 1995, p. 3. 602 THE USES OF BALKANISM balkanism are explored. Despite some insightful points, the article markedlyfails to analyseWesterninterestsin South-EastEurope, and consequently undermines Fleming's stated belief that this kind of Balkan scholarship can 'expand ...] and elucidate the theoretical categories of inquiry first developed by [postcolonialism]'.3 In this essay I will contend not only that very strong systemsof political and economic domination are facilitated by balkanist writings, and are thereforein urgentneed of analysis,but thatsuchpower systemsreveal similaritiesin styleand effectto those of classiccolonialism. The point can be seen in the context of Britishtravelwriting of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It was in this period that South-EastEurope fullyemerged in the Britishgeographicalimagination as a peripheralzone of barbarismand conflict,particularlyvia the journals of travellers,4and also that such imagining began to interact with a rapidly burgeoning political engagement on the part of the Britishstate. This is not to suggest,of course, thatVictorian balkanism was ever systematized as a discourse, or had its aims singularly determined. In contrast to the territorialacquisition and rule legitimized by colonialist writing, the forms of political power achieving vindication through balkanist paradigms were ambiguous, shifting patterns of diplomatic and economic strategy that differed between political party and political party and from one administrationto the next. Indeed, the geostrategicconcern thatBritaincame to know asthe EasternQuestion was, by itsvery appellation,definedless by historical events than by their provocation of controversy and debate.5 The Victorian travelwriters'mindfulnessof that debate, and characteristic determination to participate, produced a constant source of relevant information, but hardly clarified the issue. The bewildering political stances a contemporaryreadercould find in the travelliteratureof the era included supportforDisraeli, supportfor Gladstone,pro-Austrianism , anti-Austrianism, Turkophilia, Turkophobia, and a particularly rabid anti-Russianism. A number of memoirs even found their way towards heartfelt censure of British diplomatic policy (though this never went so far as to question Britain's right to intervene in the 'Near East'). In the light of such apparent confusion, one might well ask how the 3 Fleming, 'Orientalism, the Balkans, and Balkan Historiography', American Historical Review, 105, 2000, 4, pp. 12I8-234 (hereafter, Fleming, 'Orientalism') (p. 1220). 4 Maria Todorova captures the flavour of this writing well: see Todorova, Imaginingthe Balkans,Oxford and New York, 1997, pp. 89-I 15. I E. F. G. Law even wrote on the 'Near Eastern Question' that 'absolute impartiality is hardly to be looked for in a matter so replete with controversial issues, so pre-eminently calculated to excite passion and prejudice' (Law, 'Preface' to Allen Upward, TheEastEndof Europe. The Reportof an Unofficial Mission to theEuropeanProvincesof Turke)on theEve of the Revolution, London, I908 [hereafter, Upward, EastEnd],p. vii). ANDREW HAMMOND 603 will-to-knowledgein such writingscould have possibly translatedinto supportfor any specificmanifestationof power. The...